The Pianist As Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style

Beethoven gained an early reputation as a consummate performer, and was greatly admired in his lifetime for the wealth and power of his ideas, yet the manner of his playing the Viennese fortepiano was markedly unlike the articulate styles of Haydn and Mozart. Where does he belong in the history of musical rhetoric? Did his style mark the death of one language and the birth of another, or was it something more subtle, the emergence of a new dialect? These are some of the questions George Barth addresses as he weighs Beethoven's role in the transformation of keyboard style that accompanied the decline of the rhetorical tradition.
Dealing with Beethoven's solo and chamber keyboard works, Barth builds his evaluation on a critique of musical timekeeping and eighteenth-century descriptions of music's character, focusing especially on musicians who contributed to Beethoven's unique heritage. He selects for special consideration the writings of Johann Mattheson, who established the art of gesture as the basis for musical rhetoric; Emmanuel Bach, whose influential work helped emancipate rhetorical theory from the confines of enlightened French rationalism; and Johann Philipp Kirnberger, who applied the theory to levels below the musical surface. Turning, then, to descriptions of Beethoven's playing and his use of the metronome, the author examines the bitter dispute concerning tempo and musical character that arose among Beethoven's followers after his death, a dispute that has profoundly influenced subsequent generations of his interpreters. The clash between the two disciples, Anton Schindler and Carl Czerny, is revelatory, Barth maintains, because it stems from Beethoven's greatest achievement - a musical language that fused old and new.
Rounding out his book, he provides several discerning analyses, including an interpretation of tempo, gesture, and articulation in the Sonata in F major for pianoforte and violoncello, opus 5, no. 1, and a study of tempo flexibility in the Variations on an Original Theme, opus 34.
The Pianist as Orator will provide stimulating reading for music theorists and historians of the classical and Romantic periods, as well as for music teachers and performers - professional and amateur alike.